It is advantageous for a server to determine the geographic location of incoming client connections. For example, location determination facilitates media distribution compliance, such as for honoring sporting event black out requirements. Location determination also facilitates providing geographic sensitive advertising, sales offers, discounts, data stream sources, and the like, as well as client tracking and evaluation.
Typically, a web site identifies an incoming client Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) address (hereafter IP address), and performs a reverse Domain Name Service (DNS) lookup to obtain a text name for the IP address. This text name can then be inspected to guess a geographic location. For example, a specific IP address may resolve to “cs.sfu.ca”, from which can be deduced that the client is connecting from the Simon Frazier University in Canada. However, a problem with this technique is that many domain names cannot reliably be looked up. For example, popular “.to” and “.tv” domains indicate, from a reverse DNS lookup, that clients are respectively geographically located in Tonga and Tuvalu, notwithstanding their actually being based in the United States or another country.
Another technique is to inspect the “whois” domain name registry database to obtain registration details for a domain name. However, there the information within the database is arbitrary, and therefore it also cannot be relied upon. Thus, what is needed is a more reliable way to perform geographic location determination.